Norm linked to my piece on univowel writing, and then he and I got into an email exchange. I used words with only one vowel – “o”. My emails went like this:
1. Good Norm.
Shock boost to low nos from root blog.
Ros
2. oh Norm, oh Norm, no words now to do job words do, so soon go loon. Boot down, stop words. Vox too ghost.
3. Horror of vox loss.
4. Boff off, Norm. Too hot work for sloths. Words too slow. Show poor slop for words. Oh, no, loon toon, mon. Gross. Loco. Cool, NOT.
5. Oh, bollocks too. Motor slows, oomph blows, STOP!
This translates as “I am extremely frustrated because I cannot write what I want to when there are such restrictions on the words I can use.”
As Christian Bok says, this is “pidgin script” –people with different languages speaking to each other in a simplified lingua franca. I was becoming a foreigner with my own, and only, language.
I was reminded of being taken through Barcelona in a taxi and being desperate to say to the driver, “This is a very fine and beautiful city.” But I speak neither Catalan nor Spanish and so was in a state of bafflement, with a dam of utterance banked up in me.
There’s a character in Ending Up by Kingsley Amis, called Professor George Zeyer, a multi-lingual intellectual from Bohemia. George has had a stroke and this has left him with nominal aphasia, “that condition in which the sufferer finds it difficult to remember nouns, common terms, the names of familiar objects”.
He talks about Christmas:- “I know nobody’ll be actually blowing up, ah, coloured things you hang up, and I don’t suppose there’ll be any, you stretch them from one corner of the er, one corner to the other, but we’ll have, you write things down games, and we’ll have. . . prickly green stuff and Christmas, uh, thing you eat at the end of the meal. . .”
George is surprisingly laid back about having his tongue partially cut out like this and resolves to learn paraphrases without the nouns as if he was learning the idioms of another language. But for a writer to create a character who loses language – that’s like imagining the death of your child and writing about that. It must be a kind of self-torture. In his last years H L Mencken suffered from nominal aphasia, and he regarded it as premature death.
I write formal verse and finding the right word that will fit the rhyme and scansion scheme is hard work, with much pacing and head clutching. But then the word comes, and it does not come as an underling but as the musician joins a rock band, bringing its freight of ideas and experience and allusions that add to the sound and meaning.
But writing words with one vowel brought on the same frustration as an unco-operative colleague, or as tapping a strange ticket machine while the train is pulling out of the station. I was in a fury, the great countryside of language being visible, but being forced to take a high fenced path through it.
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